1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a coding/decoding method. More particularly, the present invention relates to a multi-view video coding/decoding method.
2. Description of Related Art
A major concern in video technology today is to extend the functionalities of available applications. Two key applications are free viewpoints video and 3D-TV. Wherein, multi-view video coding (MVC) is regarded as the essential technology of these applications, in which video sequences are acquired by multiple cameras simultaneously. While the number of views is large, the video sequences often introduce huge amounts of data, which needed to be stored or transmitted to the user particularly. Therefore, a highly efficient compression technique is necessary for MVC.
To encode multi-view video sequences, a typical coding structure employed the hierarchical prediction and inter-view prediction based on H.264/AVC. Recently, the inter-view prediction is supported in the latest draft specification of MVC as an extension of H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard.
One of the critical issues to realize a MVC is how to make it efficient in terms of resource consumption, such as memory size, bandwidth and power. The memory size for MVC is substantially increased due to the increase of the decoded picture buffer (DPB) size, which is used as storing decoded pictures for prediction of following pictures. The required DPB size for MVC is increased because both hierarchical and inter-view predictions are employed and large numbers of views are coded. Therefore, a multi-view coding/decoding method is needed to reduce the picture buffer size.